Egg, hopefully Ian can add more details about changes in the tweeter. However, on your specific question, he's already pointed out in another thread that the screen serves as a support for the diffuser which promotes smoother and wider high frequency response. Without this, the tweeter would be at a sonic disadvantage. So, it's only function isn't just to protect the dome from damage.

Thanks for the information, JohnK.

Would you happen to know if Axiom makes all their speaker parts in-house? Just curious.

Yes, they do. They own a factory in China that does some of the building. Final speaker assembly and some driver assembly is done in Canada.

is that for a better sound quality....?

There are two main reasons for manufacturing our own parts; sound quality and consistency.

The sound quality is achieved by having more options available to us when designing the finished product. If you are selecting your drivers from already available parts then you only have the crossover and the cabinet as variables that you can completely control in the design process. This will put limitations on how refined you can make your family of curves (assuming you have the facility to measure them at all). The family of curves is by far and away the thing that affects the sound quality of your finished product the most. The family of curves refers to all the amplitude response curves taken in a sphere around the loudspeaker in an anechoic environment and the various averages built from all these response curves. And finally the interpretation of all of these curves and averages which needs to be determined using Double Blind Listen Testing.

Consistency of the acoustical measurements of each part manufactured is what guarantees that every finished product you make is exactly like the original design reference. Without this there is really no point to spending a lot of time refining your original design. Consistency of the end acoustical measurement of each part in driver manufacturing is not an easy thing to achieve. Manufacturing our own drivers allows us to batch manufacture them as opposed to the usual assembly line. Batch manufacturing means that we can test each batch for acoustical consistency and never have thousands of drive units either finished or partly finished before doing a full suite of acoustical tests.

Ian,

Would it make any noticeable audio difference to change up to the newer tweeters in an existing set of V3 M80s and 180 and if so, could it be done?


Update: it would seem you already answered this question a previous post, missed it. Thx

Got mine today.

So I have been building out a set of Axiom speakers to replace my old speakers. I have 4 V3 QS8s and 1 V3 VP150. I will be purchasing the M22 on wall speakers for the front. Should I be concerned that the tweeters in the VP150/M22s will be different? Would it be worth upgrading the VP150, or would the difference be negligible?

Thanks,

Shawn.

From the point of view of the performance they will all match very well together. I assume you are not driving this system with huge power so you are not picking up any advantages on that front either. But from a cosmetic point of view the look is quite different so you may want to upgrade for that reason.

I just got off the phone with Brent Tombari and he told me directly that you cannot upgrade the QS8 v3 to the new V4 Tweeter because of the Crossover.

Is this correct.... Because i'm getting conflicting answers and am wondering if this is because some V4 speakers have a change in Crossovers while others remained the same?